O mio babbino caro
by Dr. Robert de Cyprus
Summary: The shrewd young daughter of a dead investor comes home to find her family gone. A letter by her mother instructs her to proceed down to the docks, where a boat awaits her.
1. Title Page

**O mio babbino caro***

**Un roman********

By a sick dog

_Dedicated to those who still dare to think and dream_

"**There are no supreme saviours  
Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.  
Producers, let us save ourselves  
Decree the common welfare  
That the thief might bear his throat,  
That the spirit be pulled from its prison  
Let us fan the forge ourselves  
And strike the iron while it is hot!"**

**Eugène**** Pottier**

"**The surest way to corrupt a youth **

**is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem **

**those who think alike than **

**those who think differently.****"**

**Friedrich Nietzsche**

"**Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,  
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before…  
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token…"**

**Edgar Allan Poe**

"**P****hilosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. **

**The point, however, is to change it.****"**

**Karl Marx**

"**She dwelt among the untrodden ways**

**Beside the springs of Dove,**

**A maid whom there were none to praise**

**And very few to love"**

**William Wordsworth**

"**No Gods or Kings,**

**Only man."**

**Andrew Ryan**


	2. Prologue

_Prologue: LABOR_

… My father believed in America. His family had taught him to believe in God, that God made him wealthy and successful. One day, he was playing with an old wooden rattle his mother had given him as a baby when three boys older than he came up and asked "What are you doing, you dirty peasant cretin?" They beat him and then took his rattle. He waited out in that field for five hours, weeping, calling for God to tell those boys to give back his rattle. He never again thought God would give him everything for free… no, he had to work for God's rewards. When he grew older, before his parents went to Normandy to board a boat to America, he hunted down one of the older boys, opened his leg with a piece of wrought, sharpened iron, and took back his rattle, leaving the boy shrieking and bleeding. He gave it to me when I was born. "A gift born out of hard work", is what my mother says he told me when gave it to me.

My father believed in his parents for a long while. His parents bought him food and a roof under which he could live. His mother gave him love, his father companionship and education. His mother gave him books to read and paper to write on and an audience for when he spoke and a peer which he could discuss things. His father gave him a hammer and a nail and a glove and told him that the construction yards down by Wall Street needed mending and assembling. Until he was fourteen and a young man, my father worked hard, catching on the scent of crude oil, a scent of rugged perfume that enchanted many a woman. In particular, it enchanted my mother. She smelled of plantations and sugar and tobacco, requiems carried by her from the South. My father believed, henceforth, in hard work, because hard work made his fortune.

My father believed in America because it gave him an education when he reached fifteen, dabbling in numbers and the art of Pythagoras and Thales, knowledge of the "ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and demons". America gave him a job that suited that education, as a book-keeper for an Italian man who smoked cigars; he said he reminded him of mother. That job brought him pennies to a jar he kept in his room. And those pennies he soon turned into dollars, twenty dollars to be exact. My father, he took those twenty single bills and walked down to the great exchange hall and gave it to a man and told him he wanted a share in Standard Oil. The man looked at him weird, like my father was insane. "That bum's company?" the man said to him, referring to John Rockefeller, a newcomer then. My father didn't know what to tell him. Finally, he told him, "I'm a bum too. If he's as crazy and stupid as I am, so are all of you. So what difference does it make that I give my money to this one madman?" The man laughed. "Your funeral, kid" he told him.

For ten years after that, Standard Oil muscled out almost every other oil company in the country, eventually holding a monopoly on oil. My father came back to the exchange one day and looked for the man whom had laughed at him. When he found out that the man had died from an attack, he too laughed. "Not what he expected, you see" he told everyone he told the story to. My father sold five stocks worth $100,000 each, clocking in at $500,000. He made sure Thales, Pythagoras, even Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, all the way back to the ancients Anaxagoras and Democritus and Archimedes… in his words, "Athena, Pallas herself" all watched over my soul from the cloudy heavens. My education, he said, would not be as rough as his. "You are a lady" he said, "and ladies are not all numbers and symbols on a paper."

I asked him one day, "Daddy, what do you believe in?" When he told me it was America, I said, "but didn't you believe in hard work?" He said, "Don't you see, _ma fille_? America is hard work. Right now, on the outside, there are workers pounding away at screws in steel girders and weavers mending suits and carpenters smoothing out wood, all in America. America is those men. America, then, is hard work". When I asked him whether he was glad Mr. Rockefeller made his fortune, he became upset with me and scolded me: "_Mon cher_" he said, "that man did not make my fortune… quite the contrary, I made him! He merely made his own, and in so doing I made one myself. No man gives you your fortune, not even God; it is you that must make your own fortune… These are the last few words he told me before he left to fight the greatest war humanity had ever fought; bigger, he claimed, than the last one. He made me a music box with a poem he said Rockefeller had written about himself inscribed on the bottom of the lid. You could read it when you opened it. It read…

"_I was early taught to work as well as play,_

_My life has been one long, happy holiday;_

_Full of work and full of play-_

_I dropped the worry on the way-_

_And God was good to me everyday."_

… I distinctly remember my father's funeral. It was 1945, mere days after the surrender of the Japanese. At that time, anxious and saddened over my father's death, my family had not heard of it at all… They gave him full military honors. "He whom the gathered have come to entomb was not merely a soldier" the priest said, "but an honorable and glorious man. A Frenchman by birth, who went with fury in his heart to place a pervasive defense for his father, whom gave him life and the strength to carry on…" The tears poured down my family's faces and on a few of my father's buddies' as well. I remember I found it odd I could notice. I remember my reason: tears were not blurring my vision… I don't know why I wasn't crying. Oh, but my heart was in the right place. It was beating so hard and fast, I swear it would fall off soon… but then I remembered why it was my heart was beating so: because, of all of my family, I knew why it was that the Japanese had surrendered… All that was missing was to sell tickets. It was a disgusting attraction: the slaughter of thousands of human lives… all to see on the silver screen. It was a sight of pure strike and magnificent horror. First… a bright light, a sudden blink that leaves you momentarily blind. Then, as if the air were alive and sick with rabies, the explosion seems to suck everything in as a startup, a convulsion of earth and wind. And then… the explosion… As if God himself had spoken to some fool amongst us, it comes suddenly and with such horrible retribution it is likely to render one deaf, blind and dumb. Yes, it is a thunderous recourse, ending with a ball of fire that pierces heaven itself. But… that day, even though I was angry and disgusted, I found some sort of cancellation of emotion… I remembered that if my father were here, he'd applaud their efforts. "Just comes to show you" he'd say, I just knew it would be what he'd say, "there needs to be no God for miracles to happen."


End file.
